In the developing debate on Irish foreign policy and military neutrality provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine it is important to understand two issues: how the crisis is recasting power and regional blocs in world politics; and how Ireland’s historical experience relates to this changing world order.
Both issues should be foregrounded in discussing where Irish interests and values are identified and where its memberships, allegiances and affiliations could lie. A better informed quality of public debate, perhaps through a citizens’ assembly, as suggested by Taoiseach Micheál Martin, needs to highlight and link both aspects.
Other world powers such as China, and regional blocs like Asean in southeast Asia look on the war through the lens of a stronger US role in Europe
Among the unanticipated effects of the Russian invasion surely the greatest has been the how it has resurrected Nato’s role as a military alliance, bringing European states into alignment with the United States. Russia’s reassertion of imperial power forcibly reminds its previous subjects in central and eastern Europe why they joined Nato in the 1990s and 2000s after the Warsaw Pact disintegrated in 1989-1991.
Despite the uncertain future of US links with Europe and the European Union in the early 2020s, these events have galvanised that alliance.
Whether and how this new relationship will play out through the war is still in the balance. US and British leaders insist Putin can be defeated by Ukraine’s forces and pledge continuing large-scale military aid for that outcome. In doing so they justify its description by informed observers as a proxy US war against Russia taking place alongside the Ukrainian one.
If this elongates the war by months or years, it will make peace negotiations all the more difficult and risks further escalation. That cuts across the interests of French, German and other European leaders to bring the fighting to an end more rapidly. Coming weeks will see this drama played out after Macron’s victory in the French presidential elections.
Peace talks
The Putin regime and Ukrainian leaders will have to weigh up this balance of forces in deciding whether and when to revive peace talks. Previous formulae for doing so based on Ukrainian neutrality and federal autonomy for the Donbas and Luhansk regions look increasingly unrealistic.
Other world powers such as China, and regional blocs like Asean in southeast Asia look on the war through the lens of a stronger US role in Europe. They wonder how that will affect the European Union’s own power and its ambitions to develop a strategic autonomy.
The Chinese in particular need to decide soon whether their best interests lie with a weaker Russia led by Putin and if this will undermine their ambitions to forge a more balanced relationship with a stronger EU in world politics and economics.
Opinion polling shows a public open to international engagement and EU membership but decisively against a departure from military neutrality
Ireland’s historical experience as a colony of imperial Britain whose anti-imperial nationalism gave it a distinctive role in achieving independence, comes into play here. The combination of military neutrality with an internationalist agenda of nuclear non-proliferation, multilateralism, development policies and United Nations peacekeeping is distinctive and honourable.
These recent events, alongside changing geopolitical realities involving the EU’s role in world affairs, expose how comparatively ill-equipped and under-funded Ireland’s Defence Forces are to sustain such a role.
That weakness is now publicly acknowledged and relatively uncontroversial. The same cannot be said for the wider strategic and foreign policy setting now at play in world politics.
Positive image
The values emerging from Ireland’s experience need to be related to these international changes. They do not point only towards military alignment with Nato, and nor are they necessarily directly comparable with other European neutrals or former Warsaw Pact members in central and eastern Europe.
That said, existing participation in EU foreign and security policies is likely to be deepened and remains compatible with military non-alignment.
Ireland’s non-alignment gives it a positive image with other world regions coming out of colonial pasts, or subject to US imperial power projection. Too rapid or ill-considered an association with Nato would be a mistake in this international setting. A better-informed deliberation is needed before any such decisions are made.
Our experience with citizens’ assemblies linked in to public representatives have promise here (the formula will be used again in the debate on Dublin mayors and local democracy). Opinion polling shows a public decidedly open to international engagement and EU membership but decisively against a departure from military neutrality.
It surely makes sense to relate the upscaling of Ireland’s Defence Forces called for in the recent commission report to the debate on how that relates to foreign policy priorities.